Dig for Victory

6th February 2026

Our latest VIPs have distracted us so much we haven’t written anything for ages – so this is a bumper blog!

Part 1: springing a leak

The VIPs pointed out nearly two weeks ago (whilst sunning themselves by the pool) that one of the pipes had a pretty little fountain spraying from a cracked joint. Hmmm. My ingenious and practical wife retrieved the remaining jointing compound left over from the en-suite bathroom refurb and managed to reduce the fountain to a drip. Unfortunately it was quite a speedy drip, so the next morning I set to work with assorted weaponry:

In no time I managed to extract a large root in several sections:

This freed the pipe…

…but unfortunately didn’t stop the drip. Not only that, but I came within a whisker of driving the spade clean through another pipe buried deep under the first one. A close shave (whisker – geddit? 😉). Nothing for it but to summon help. Our pool service team rustled up a fixer. Naturally he turned up unannounced a few days later when we weren’t home. Luckily for him our friends let him in, only for him to decide that he didn’t have the necessary parts and would return the following day. He didn’t. At the time of writing he still hasn’t. Things are a little different here in the Caribbean…we cool.

Part 2: a bit of history

The land surrounding Pollards Mill was originally the Pollard sugar plantation, and remained in private hands for around 250 years. We believe it was 111 acres by 1913 – relatively small, one of hundreds across Barbados. These plantations ran into severe financial difficulties in the twentieth century due to being unable to compete with far larger plantations in South America, Africa and Asia. Eventually the government stepped in and now owns a lot of former plantations, including the land around us. This land has not been farmed or managed for many years, and is now a mixture of cane growing wild, scrub, and bush. In the dry season it may be susceptible to fire. Last year we decided to try to bring the immediate bush around us under some control as a preventative safety measure. Obviously this isn’t our responsibility but the government isn’t going to do it any time soon, so it’s in our interest. This big job got a good start last April, and yesterday our friend Greg returned with his bobcat, accompanied by our gardener Jason, and between them they worked miracles. Think of Moses’ parting of the Red Sea:

Those stones are either going to be rebuilt into the wall in places, or form part of a rather large rockery! Some are huge – check the soft drink bottle for scale:

Walking along the exposed garden wall I realised that we have the Bajan equivalent of the masterful Inca architecture at Cuzco and Machu Picchu, especially the bits where the Spanish conquistadores built on top of the original buildings. It’s all going on here:

The older sections feature coral stone embedded in the construction:

Pretty amazing. Of course, much more was revealed besides. Mature river tamarind trees making their home in the wall, lifting the odd stone along the way:

Now they’ve been tamed, the challenge is to keep on top of them. We need to keep an eye on the next generation!

Part 3: creating an orchard

Back in the 1970s my mother used to keep avocado stones, impale them on cocktail sticks, soak them in water and (I think) keep them in the airing cupboard hoping they’d sprout. Needless to say, none of them ever produced anything. Roll forward 50 years and Nicola has done the same thing with the huge stones from last autumn’s gorgeous local avocado pears and, green-fingered genius that she is, produced three strapping young tree saplings. No airing cupboard required. She nurtured them in pots till they were bursting out of the terracotta and Jason’s sidekick Chris has planted them near the sour orange tree to make the beginnings of a small orchard: